Understandably, my travel was not defined and planned in one day. In retrospect, I was waiting for quite a while until my initial desires or something similar were being cooked in the back of my head. And one day, I finally realized that I wanted to travel for sure. The ‘cooking’ process took almost one year, and the actual preparation for the travel took as long as two years.
Although the cooking was a continuous process, I had the ‘eureka’ moment when I knew that I definitely wanted to travel around the world. It was when I was working full-time in Washington D.C., and I would check some of the travel blogs I follow on the weekends, mostly for cool photos and out of curiosity. I was scrolling down a post where there were photos overlooking the traditional market in Istanbul. And I asked myself, “If my oldest self in the future could look at me right now, where would he want me to spend this stage of my life? in D.C. while pursuing a ‘professional’ career path? or out there at the market learning new things about Turkey?” And my answer was solidly the latter. It still remains the same. Needless to say, here Turkey refers to the world or the unknown. From the perspective of an expected average life span, the investment of two years or so seemed very easy to justify. And when you think about the ‘game-changing’ potential of your newly acquired perspectives about the world and yourself, it seemed only logical to me to travel. So in this regard, I was not afraid to leave behind my old job and the general benefits and certainty; I was much more afraid of the regret of not having done something at all.
The ‘Night Before’ Interview
After making the big decision, I was spending as much free time I could afford to plan and prepare for my travel. In addition to the physical aspect of the preparation, I spent a lot of time in front of a word document. I was constantly revising the expense plan, the itinerary, and the duration. More importantly, I put effort into making my motivation statement convincing to myself and defining what I want to get out of this experience, both in a physical sense and non-physical sense. It might sound a lot of work but I enjoyed this stage a lot.
When it was just one day before the journey begins, I wanted to record myself so that I could later compare my fresh and innocent self with the future well-traveled old man. I was initially planning to film myself with the imposing Lincoln Memorial as the background, but I needed to catch my dear friend Roku at his house one last time and while in his place I thought it’d be nice to make the video in an interview format.
The following is the result. I talk about the overall plan, the itinerary, why I am doing this, and what I think it would mean to me. Based on the time of writing this post, this interview was filmed about 1 year and 5 months ago. And much of what I said then still remains valid, although my travel motivation and what it would mean to me seem to evolve constantly.